In the last two countries the United States invaded, Afghanistan and Iraq, officials subsequently set up parliamentary and not republican forms of government, with a unicameral Parliament rather than a bicameral legislature. Afghanistan does have a Presidential system and is thus somewhat closer to the US form of government, but the President in Iraq is [...]

It’s a sad commentary on our media that the President had to answer questions yesterday about drones for the first time, and the questions didn’t come at a White House press briefing or major print interview, but in a virtual YouTube town hall with members of the public. FDL’s Kevin Gosztola covered this at The [...]

The sad chapter of the Haditha massacre may have been put to bed in a legal sense when Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich received an incomparably light sentence, walking away with no jail time, for ordering the troops under his command to “shoot first, ask questions later” in an incident that killed 24 innocent Iraqis. [...]

Some US contractors are getting a lesson in the new Iraq. The Iraqi government has detained hundreds of contractors, including some who work for the State Department at the US embassy, on a variety of charges. Iraqi authorities have detained a few hundred foreign contractors in recent weeks, industry officials say, including many Americans who [...]

Maybe this is the new big plan for the economy: sell as many weapons to the Middle East as possible. Let a million Rosie the Riveters bloom. That this buildup endangers an entire region, one holding the keys to the current energy infrastructure of the world, is just a sidelight to this, I guess. First, [...]

The row between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi has grown. Maliki issued a warrant for Hashemi’s arrest on terrorism charges, accusing him of operating pro-Sunni death squads. Hashemi denied the charges, and supporters of him and his party compared Maliki’s actions to that of Saddam Hussein. Maliki is now ordering [...]

Sunni lawmakers criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for seeking the arrest of one of the country’s Vice Presidents on terrorism charges. And that VP, Tareq al-Hashemi, escalated the dispute by asking the Arab League to intervene: In dismissing the charges against him as fabricated and part of machinations by premier Nuri al-Maliki, Vice President [...]

The war ended in Iraq last night, and within moments, it seems, chaos has reigned in the Iraqi Parliament. But while this is almost sure to be used as evidence that the military should never have left Iraq, the events here would have played out at some point, in absence of perpetual occupation. Via Juan [...]

Jonathan Bernstein reveals himself as someone who hasn’t followed the Iraq debacle very closely over the past three years in this elegy for it. The United States War in Iraq is finally officially over today. It’s an occasion well worth marking. Why did it end? Certainly not because the matter was settled on the battlefield, [...]

As we wind down the overt military phase of the Iraq war, I think this article carries some important knowledge. In Iraq as well as Afghanistan, the way out of the country has been to train native security forces to take over. We trained hundreds of thousands of security personnel in Iraq, and just as [...]

In a ceremony known as “Casing the Colors,” the US military formally ended their mission in Iraq, with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on hand to make things official. The location of the ceremony gives away exactly how this war is ending, and it doesn’t read “triumphantly.” In a fortified concrete courtyard at the airport in [...]